use meson build

[jianhe-fun]

hi.
any plan to use meson build instead of cmake?
https://mesonbuild.com/

[carenas]

instead of cmake?

I don't think meson support in Windows is good enough to "replace" cmake (which is also foundational for other build systems), but there is a Meson wrap that I had contributed to and are overdue on updating that could be used instead AFAIK.

[NWilson]

We don't have plans for Meson currently.

Each of our current supported build systems is there for a reason.

• Autoconf: required for old Unix platforms (commercial) without CMake (rare these days)
• CMake: required for good IDE support, Windows support, generally most-used. Required for us to supply a CMakeLists.txt so that C/C++ package managers like vcpkg or Conan can consume PCRE2
• Zig: it's a separate language, makes sense it needs its own magic (sadly)
• Bazel: This one is the outlier. It's incredibly opinionated. You can't shell out to a third-party build system from Bazel, we have to supply a native Bazel build for those clients

In Meson, can you not incorporate a CMake dependency by invoking CMake on it? CMake is so dominant, there must be a pattern for consuming libraries with pkg-config, or CMake config files?

What advantage would there be for you? Unless you need it, we probably won't add it.